April 2017

I was curious to know how many of the designs I have made still need to have a pattern written, and after going through the 400+ projects on my Ravelry projects page, I discovered that there are approximately 50 projects that still need a pattern written.

Feeling overwhelmed, I did what I usually do when I feel that way: I got out my crochet and got to work.

My current front burner project is a crochet cat for my oldest son’s cat, Mr. Bigglesworth. I had decided to use a ball of yarn that I had made by tying yarn scraps end to end with a square knot. The crochet itself was a little slow going.

Initially, I had been uncertain that I had made the correct decision in having the yarns ends on the outside of the project, but more than one cat owner assured me that their cat would prefer the ends to be on the exterior rather than the interior, so I persisted, doing my best to ignore the awkwardness of crocheting with so many knots in my yarn, and eventually, I had both ears and done, and had woven in all of the ends that were to be woven in.

Here is how the interior of the scrap crochet cat looked:

Inside out scrap cat

Now all that was left to do was turn scrap cat right side out, embroider a face, stuff the cat, seam the top, attach the ears, crochet a tail, and then attach said tail.

For the face, I decided not to use buttons as were used in the original, but to instead embroider all the features just as I would for a small child. In short order the face was done:

Scrap cat gets a face

and while the face had gone smoothly, it had generated four new ends to weave in, so I dispatched with those, and then set about stuffing the body of the cat and then securing the top seam:

The top seam of the crochet scrap cat

While I had been tempted to try a kind of over efficient move of “attaching the ears while securing the top seam,” I decided (wisely for a change) to not do that, and instead attached the ears, after I had finished the top seam, an order of operations which worked well for both me and the cat:

Scrap cat ready for a crochet scrap tail

Now the only thing left was to crochet a tail. Not certain that the directions outlined in the pattern I was using would work with scrap yarn, I instead decided to make a hyperbolic curlicue, which seemed to suit scrap cat:

Scrap cat gets a tail

Now that scrap cat is done, I will pack him up and send him to his home, and then it will just be me and my list, and with any luck but this time next week, I will have the number of patterns to write on that list down to 49.